[cjpearson]

The sticker price arms race will continue until the incentives change. Having an absurdly high listed tuition price is simply effective advertising, even if almost nobody actually pays that price. Surely the most expensive colleges must be the best.

Colleges know that outside of a few suckers, few will pay the full price even if they have the money. So they offer massive discounts to get you to sign. To help seal the deal, they will market the discount as something special for you based on your "merit". "Normally we charge $75k, but since you're so awesome we can give you a $30k merit scholarship." Sounds like you're getting a great deal as long as you don't find out that the actual average charged tuition is $35k and you're actually the one getting milked.

[dugmartin]

We are going through this now with our youngest. All the private schools are $85k+/year but every one of them has offered a merit scholarship that brings the price down to around $5k above the public schools. Such a great deal.

[newsclues]

How do you change incentives when the people in charge of the incentive system have a interest in maintaining the status quo?

[HarryHirsch]

By outside forces, of course. Women entered the legal profession in the 1920's, but wages did not catch up until the Equal Pay Act was enacted under the Kennedy administration. There were plenty of labour market arbitrageurs profiting from the game, but the Civil Rights movement proved stronger.

[anonym29]

Unfortunately, all of the labor market arbitrageurs went away, and now we're stuck in this weird economy where women get paid 83¢ on the dollar for identical work performance, in an economy that is deeply entrenched in boundless corporate greed, and yet no major companies appear to have effectively capitalized on the free, automatic, statistically-guaranteed 17% ROI that's just sitting on the table by replacing men with women. I guess our laws against unlawful gender discrimination in hiring must be so strict that no large companies have ever been able to do it at scale without getting caught and fined, no? How else do you explain for-profit companies turning away free money?

[whiplash451]

This is typically where the government steps in.

[drillsteps5]

It did. It is part of the system. This is how it works.

1. Colleges set exorbitantly high prices.

2. The government-supported system assesses families' ability to pay though FAFSA process, where you submit your tax returns (not that you have to, IRS is government as well) with your wage/business income, then list all your assets (minus retirement accounts such as 401Ks) and liabilities. Then the FAFSA spits out your expected contribution, TELLING you how much you can afford to pay for your kids education.

3. Colleges and government then use this number to determine how much "financial need" you have. They can "meet your financial need" by letting you pay less than the sticker price (it's called "need-based scholarship"), or allow to take loans on favorable terms to close the difference between the sticker price and your ability to pay (that they determined). More often it's a combination of the two (depending how desirable college is and how good of the student they perceive your kid to be).

[johnnyanmac]

meanwhile, the idea of paying out the nose for most post-secondary education overseas is laughable. You never have to go into 5-6 figures of debt just to get an education. Even 30 years ago US colleges had a huge amount of tuition covered by state governments. But decades of cuts pushed more of the tuition on the student and now people in the propoganda just want DoED as a whole to crumble.

[atom-morgan]

Isn't that exactly why we're in the position we're in? Near universal financial aid driving up prices?

[soco]

How do you explain other countries where education is basically free?

[Mountain_Skies]

Do other countries allow nearly everyone who wants to attend to do so? In the US, while you can't necessarily go to whatever school you want, pretty much everyone has multiple choices of schools they can attend. Even people with Down Syndrome are now earning bachelor degrees. Not special programs for those with learning disabilities but degrees in regular programs. If they're able to pay, they're able to attend. Since most of this is financed via student loans, living expenses are covered too regardless of if the student has any realistic prospect of ever paying off the debt.

[CWuestefeld]

This is consistent with the top-level response, about expense signaling quality.

Consider the quantity of people coming from outside the USA to study. It may be that foreigners looking for prestigious schools are searching in the USA because their own system is middling (except maybe for a flagship school?). Thus, they're also doing the damage to the USA's education market while not affecting their own domestic one.

[buran77]

> foreigners looking for prestigious schools are searching in the USA because their own system is middling

See how you called it "prestigious" not "expensive", and "middling" not "cheap"? Price contributes to the feeling of quality of any product but it's neither necessary nor sufficient. There's more than that just the price.

The US is an economic powerouse, it attracts top talent in every area or level because it offers opportunities and high rewards. Even the language is part of the cycle which fuels this talent attraction. This brings results, the results bring prestige, and the prestige brings in more talent.

An expensive school in Bulgaria will not attract that kind of talent because fewer people are attracted to living, working, or learning the local language there. Heck, even a no-name US school couldn't attract talent by jacking up prices.

[mixmastamyk]

US does guaranteed loans which guarantees high prices. Other countries build a public university and charge little which keeps prices down.

[jjk166]

The US typically helps people afford expensive things, insulating people from rising prices.

Other countries typically regulate prices, preventing things from becoming expensive to begin with.

This applies to education, health care, housing, and more.

[anonym29]

Wealthy progressives in other countries put their money where their mouth is. Wealthy progressives in the US only pay lip service to progressive values because they only support wealth redistribution when it's being done with other people's money, then they magically flip and become some weird hybrid mercantilist-nationalist conservatives who insist upon privatizing gains, but only up until their brilliance fails them and they need to come beg the US taxpayer for handou- err... bailouts, emphasizing the values of the collective good as justification for forcing the rest of us to socialize their losses.

This is why Ivy League schools have endowments larger than the GDP of some micronations and are financially being run like hedge funds, while still simultaneously being supported with US taxpayer money. The progressive orthodoxy does not hold these institutions accountable for institutional greed and selfishness because of a shared cultural affinity between progressive politics and higher education, and because all of the negative externalities of the spiritual sins of selfishness and greed at institutional scale are forgiven for the virtue of being a nonprofit under the idiosyncratic, dogmatic priesthood of progressivism.

The US doesn't have progressives. We have conservatives and conservatives LARPing as progressives when it's financially convenient for them.

On a related note, this is also why Canada and the UK can make single-payer healthcare work and why the US can't. Some of those shadowy GOP dark money donors are the same faces that the public would associate with progressive thought leadership. They're following a Machiavellian playbook where they attempt to portray themselves as publicly virtuous while remaining the same soulless, greedy multimillionaires or billionaires that instinctively think from a place of unadulterated self interest behind the scenes.

[whiplash451]

Lots of European countries have cheap (not free) excellent universities.

The price signal is almost the other way around (the more expensive, the less likely it is to be a good place).